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Free Software Migration

The Kerala State Legislative Assembly's migration to free software platform is a major milestone for the free software movement in the state and Zyxware Technologies is proud to be part of it. Zyxware successfully completed the Free software migration for the Kerala State Legislative Assembly (Niyamasabha) under the effective guidance and management of The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS). This is a significant move as it places Kerala Niyamasabha at par with bodies such as the City of Munich, French National Police, ICBC etc. on the list of large institutions who have adopted Free Software. Yet another factor which makes this undertaking unique is the fact that the entire documentation at the Niyamasabha is done in Malayalam, one of the most complex languages among the Indic ones. The Kerala Legislative Assembly used to produce all its documentation, both printed and digital, on a Free Software platform based on Ubuntu Linux. The Niyamasabha IT department decided to take up the massive task of migrating its IT infrastructure onto GNU/Linux and engaged ICFOSS as its Technical Advisor and Zyxware Technologies, one of the flag bearers of Free Software in Kerala, as its implementation partner. The biggest challenge lay in addressing the concerns of the users in the documentation team in Niyamasabha about using GNU/Linux platforms. To tackle this bottleneck, Zyxware provided a forum for all users to list out their specific concerns and develop solutions to address them. This was led by Mr. Sooraj Kenoth, Free Software Consultant, Zyxware Technologies, following an interactive session with the department staff. Mr. Kenoth, an adept Change Management specialist, was able to demonstrate the various advantages of using Malyalam Computing on GNU/Linux. The department staff were pretty much impressed with the possibility of getting a Unicode encoded Malayalam output and availability of a multitude of documenting features on the GNU/Linux platform. Today, the employees have taken up the ownership of the documentation process and are interacting with various Free Software Communities to obtain solutions for the new problems which arise in their daily activities.